NYT Games: Wordle & Crossword

NYT Games Review: Wordle Free, Crossword $6.99

Six Puzzles, One a Day Each

Wordle gives six guesses at a five-letter word; Connections asks for four groups of four from sixteen tiles; Strands hides a themed word search with one spanning answer; Spelling Bee builds words from seven letters around a required centre; the Mini is a five-by-five crossword solvable in a minute, and the full Crossword is the newspaper's own. Each arrives once a day and expires into the archive. That restraint is the design: you cannot binge, so the app is a two-minute habit rather than a time sink.

Statistics and WordleBot Turn It Into Practice

The stats screen tracks puzzles solved, solve rate, current and longest streak, and average solve time broken down by day of the week — 537 crosswords solved at 61.4%, with Friday plainly the hardest, in the store example. WordleBot goes further, rating a finished game for skill and luck against the average of more than a hundred thousand players and counting how many steps an optimal solver would have needed. Very few puzzle apps show you how you compare on the same puzzle everyone else played that morning.

What Is Free, and What the Subscription Buys

Wordle, Connections, Strands and the Mini are free daily; the full Crossword, Spelling Bee's complete play and the archive of roughly ten thousand past puzzles sit behind a subscription — the App Store lists games at $4.99 and $5.99 a month, and the crossword at $6.99 monthly or $39.99 a year. Google Play carries no advertising badge, though Apple's listing mentions advertising. The install is 134.6 MB, and both stores show 4.8 stars, from 142,000 Play reviews and 293,000 Apple ratings. Both platforms agree on the quality, which is rare for a free-to-start app with a paywall inside it.